Sort one inside another

November 5, 2022

I have a class Person that contains names and hobbies. Then there’s a list that contains people.

person1 = Person("MarySmith", ["dancing", "biking", "cooking"])
person2 = …
people = [person1, person2,..]

I need to return a list of people sorted alphabetically by their name, and also sort their list of hobbies alphabetically.

This is what I have so far:

def sort_people_and_hobbies(people: list) -> list:
    result = []
    for p in people:
        result.append(p)
    return sorted(result, key=lambda x: x.names)

This is what I’m expecting to get:

print(sort_people_and_hobbies(people))  # -> [KateBrown, MarySmith,..]
print(person1.hobbies)  # -> ['biking', 'cooking', 'dancing']

I don’t get how to implement sorting for hobbies into this. No matter what I do I get an unsorted list of hobbies.

>Solution :

You didn’t give the implementation of Person, so it’s hard to give an exact answer. I assume the following.

class Person:
    def __init__(self, name: str, hobbies: list[str]):
        self.name = name
        self.hobbies = hobbies

def sort_people_and_hobbies(people: list[Person]) -> list[Person]:
    for person in people:
        person.hobbies.sort() # we don't have this implementation
                              # so if it's not a dataclass, then modify
    return sorted(people, key = lambda x: x.name)

You could also sort a Person‘s hobbies upon class creation.